The cat of habit poem analysis line by line Introducing this first publication outside New Zealand of a posthumous selection from the poetic oeuvre of Janet Frame (1924–2004), Bill Manhire remembers his attempt to persuade her that the poems she was denigrating (‘…none of them are any good. I can’t keep them on a plane. They don’t end, they fall away.’) were to be valued not despite, but for their faults: ‘I started talking – gabbling, really – about how the flaw, the awkward, clumsy moment, could often be what guaranteed a poem its grace as well as its authenticity.’ Yes, but what is there in ‘awkward, clumsy’ moments that lets them give a poem grace and authenticity on one occasion, but wrecks it on another? Auden wrote feelingly of ‘goodness wasted at peripheral fault’ in his early poem, ‘Since you are going to
begin today’. Manhire cites Auden’s 1951 introduction to Adrienne Rich’s first book, as a means of highlighting her contemporary New Zealander, Janet Frame’s lack of sympathy with that period’s styles. Auden promotes poems that are ‘neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.’ Though he might merely be advising young poets, in Yeats’s words, to ‘learn your trade’, what’s wrong with his analogy is its coming from a finishing school for ladies. Manhire implies that such social coercions are not good for art. Yet it’s an open question whether faults of technique stick out sore-thumb-fashion more in free or regular verse.

Frame’s ‘L-Driver’, from The Pocket Mirror (1967), the one collection she published, tells how ‘leaving no address and a false name’ a hit-and-run poet ‘swerved to avoid a homily / and struck a metaphor’. The poet asks: ‘what if / I swerve again, but having no murdered metaphor / to support me I plunge to my death over the cliff?’ Poetry does need ‘swerve’: it has to have torque in the movement of its phrases across caesuras, around line endings, and towards closes. ‘The Cat of Habit’ is in a modulated, lightly rhymed, irregular verse:

The cat of habit curls her spine
in the most windless the most warm place
shivering a little with, ‘It’s mine’,
an ear-twitch, tail-flip
of permanent ownership.

The cat of habit
has the place marked,
the joint cased.

Feed and sleep and feed
and half-heartedly catch
moths and mice and mostly watch
hourlong for the passing witch
for many, unseen, pass
through the rooms of the house and outside,
under the trees and in the grass.

The first stanza’s clinching rhyme is delicately off-balanced by the different stress and pitch on ‘-flip’ and ‘-ship’; the rhymeless short verse keeps this ‘habit’ vigilantly varied with a self-contained rhythmic poise, while the third verse’s triple rhyme (‘catch’, ‘watch’, ‘witch’) subtly varies the vowel. Frame achieves an improvised freedom of movement and rhymes with the casual art of a poet accepting the gifts that come to hand. Yet shouldn’t there be a comma in the middle of the second line (‘the windless the most warm’)? And while there might be a comma after ‘witch’, does there need to be one after ‘outside’? So are these authorial or editorial slips, or insignificant irregularities in work the poet didn’t put through the press?

‘Storms Will Tell’, the book’s editorially chosen title poem,
is metaphorically inventive:

Give us the news say the tall ascetics reading
ten miles of beach over and over; between empty shells, look,
burning from the salt press, stories
of flood: How I abandoned house and home.
Razor: How I slit the throat of sunlight.
Ramshorn: How I butted and danced at the ewe sunlight.
Cockle: How my life sailed away on a black tide.

Once beyond the sagging second line, its caesura interrupting a row of prepositions, this verse twists forward with a crisp imperative (‘shells, look, / burning’) and a vigorous enjambment (‘salt-press, stories / of flood’). If the flaw in the second line is such as might be pointed out in a workshop, the three spondee-like stopped endings (‘sunlight’, ‘sunlight’, ‘black tide’) are neither what tyro poets tend to do, nor evidently strengths or weaknesses. One difficulty with Manhire’s justification is that a fine writer transforms what could be thought flaws into significant characteristics, giving formal devices unique thematic significances.

Frame’s range in these previously uncollected works is wide. She can, for instance, do a perfectly attuned three-line lyric (‘The Chickadee’). She can also do extended, long-lined free verse like ‘The Landfall Desk’. The last of the uncollected poems, ‘How I Began to Write’, ends:

Unwrapping the world,
unwrapping the world
where pine trees still say lonely, sigh, night, and refuse,
refuse, and their needles of deceit drop in my eyes,
I began to write.

Listen how the words associated with the experience of the pine trees send out sounds that counteract the ‘refuse, / refuse’ enjambment and are caught on the wing by the ‘eyes’ and ‘write’ endings that tell us how such composition is an answering back to the world.

To turn from Frame’s intriguing experiments to Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry is to encounter the work of one who has struck a vein and modestly worked it. His poems typically find their centre of gravity in recounting legendary local events (‘The Saga of McGuinness’s Dog’, for example). Not all of them, however, are set in rural Ireland. ‘Immaturities’ touches on the Munich air crash of 1958, recently commemorated at Old Trafford:

But when, that February, ice on the wing
Caused the United plane to crash,
Club differences were dropped. Cuttings came
From the Evening News about the Sheffield match,
Reporting ‘a ghost in every red shirt’.

O’Donoghue’s ‘Manchester mother was a City fan,’ and, he adds, ‘So I’m one too.’ The poem tells of her responses to events unexpected by her son and other family members. It concludes with their shock at how she behaved at her husband’s death. They had thought that ‘those half-hushed night arguments / Meant she’d take it with indifference.’ However, ‘when we opened the door, we thought the noise / That greeted us was a mad cow roaring.’ His technique is quiet toned, a prosaic style that gains resonance by giving the details of story a clear role in the poem’s trajectory, leaving the reader to calibrate what the implications might be.

His work displays the intimate distance of the participant observer. ‘The State of the Nation’ finds the poet in boyhood encountering institutional prejudice against ‘the travelling people’, having fallen asleep reading of their persecution both by the Nazis and the National Guard in Spain. Here the anecdotal incident, in which he goes down to the local encampment only to find a sign saying ‘Temporary Dwellings Prohibited’ and everyone gone, may be too much of an illustration to the poem’s 1790 epigraph from John Philpot Curran: ‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance’. O’Donoghue’s poetry balances on the edge of effectively keeping a secret by telling you it’s got one, and the right-mindedly plain portrayal of decent sensitivities.

What the blurb of his Selected Poems calls a condition of ‘exile’, having grown up in Manchester and spent his working life at the University of Oxford, while retaining a hinterland from Ireland, appears more an enabling mythic doubleness than a bitter fact of consciousness. ‘Goalkeepers’, though, seems to imply a life-wrecking division:

When I first read the papers, Cork’s goalie
Was a legend whose brother I got to know
In Oxford a generation later.
He lived towards the bottom of Divinity,
In a houseful of quiet, single, courteous,
Drinking Irishmen. He never boasted of
His celebrated brother: even discouraged
Talk of him. And one cold January night
He jumped from Folly Bridge into the Thames.

O’Donogue’s poetry tends to a blurring at the line-ends and to stiff jointing at caesuras. This encourages modulated, tidy narration. There’s nothing garrulous about his poems. In line with the precariously enjambed line-endings, they tend to steer clear of rhymes and almost never use them to clinch ideas epigrammatically.

His low-key technique works to focus attention on the details of unpointed story. The poems begin in casual observations, building with deceptive indirection, to a conclusion that may sting or shock, as in ‘The Definition of Love’, where a young curate ‘crashed to his death’ because he ‘fantasized in vain’ about touching his mother’s ‘fingers one last time’. When the pressure isn’t high enough, they leave a reader at a loss what to do with the revelation or tacit moral of the tale – as in ‘Rhubarb, Rhubarb’, apparently about the point in the summer when it starts to taste bitter, which ends ‘and you throw out / July’s Irish Times at the end of August’. Not for this poet Donne’s advice to mint the poem with a coiner’s hammer-blow in its final line. ‘The Company of the Dead’ sidles up and away like a telling afterthought:

Also, they’ve no unrealized agendas,
their eager questions no barbed implications.
They’re no trouble round the place, their only wish
now to get warmer: apart, that is, from wishing
that they’d kept warmer while they had the chance.

His closes frequently usher themselves in with a low-pressure enjambment like the ‘-ing / that’ here. ‘Immaturities’ ended with the same word at the start of its final line. Reading the verse above, you could also wonder whether there isn’t one ‘that’ too many. Are these flaws? O’Donoghue’s poetry is too finely imagined in its themed anecdotal mode to dislike, yet for the most part it is written in a style gone out of its way to leave precious little formal trace.

The rhythmic ringing of horses’ hooves has sounded through Alison Brackenbury’s poetry from the first. In Singing in the Dark, both ‘Spooked’ and ‘Waking’ touch on the precarious place her favourite animals have in our world. Victorian poets feared that the disappearance of horse powered transport would wreck the rhythms of English verse. Her poems remind us that the animal has not yet disappeared from the scene and its organic rhythms, at gallop or stalled, can still be formative, as in ‘Marking Time’:

How many hours have I leaned on horses
In leaking stables, to wait for the rain
To end, while a glistening ear-tip flickers
The swallows criss-cross to their eaves again
While the lightning prints its electric whites
In the dark beyond sight …

If that double ‘while’, and without a comma after ‘again’, might count as a clumsy moment, her poem is given a characteristic forward motion by its closer affinity to traditional iambics, and to the integrity of the line as a more or less stopped unit of sense and form. She is also far happier tagging her lines with rhyme-sounds, and marking her thematic closes with the reinforcing assurances of familiar sounds and echoes.

The title of her collection draws attention to the cultural contribution of her poetry’s music, though its recall of the colloquial ‘whistling in the dark’ also shows a mordant wit about the efficacy of poetry in difficult times. Her title is taken from the collection’s opening poem, ‘Edward Thomas’s Daughter’. ‘Will Russia’s gas put out our lights?’ she asks at the end of its penultimate stanza, with a peremptory urgency that breaks into the poem from nowhere, adding:

The robin brushes me at dusk.
Our good bones fail. We leave no mark.
His voice, she writes, was clear and quiet.
I hear him singing in the dark.

The ambiguous reference of the ‘him’ pronoun in the final line is deft. We are in the territory of Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’, yet also the folk belief in the dead being rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, so that a poet and countryman ninety years dead might imaginatively be heard through the note of that common native bird.

Brackenbury is like Hardy too in her outrage at the treatment of animals that cannot defend themselves. ‘Provision’ tells how ‘horses of the First World War / Shipped out to Egypt’ were ‘Sold, without oats or tack’ and ‘found / Starved, scabbed, in Cairo, between shafts.’ She then fast-forwards to a later conflict, probably World War II, though other bloodbaths are implied in ‘A groom I knew marched through Iraq / To haul their buckets, shine their coats’:

That war too ended. There they stood,
Sixteen hands high, without a spot
On their smooth shoulders. Do not say
Soldiers learn nothing. They were shot.

While the internal rhyme of ‘shoulders’ and ‘soldiers’ helps to energize the poem’s close, it’s possible to feel a doubt about that ‘not’ in the tonally problematic ‘Do not say’. After all, it only fails entirely to smudge the poem’s closing rhyme because it takes less stress than the words around it, and only then because of the slightly arch imperative. Brackenbury’s poems frequently display both grace and authenticity, except when she relies too heavily on her technique’s armature, as in ‘The Jane Austen Reader’ about how the famous books aren’t true to life, or ‘Breakfast Show’ about a radio presenter who muffs her first moment on air.

Once more this is a Hardyesque fault – part of practising poetry even when its occasions are more or less lacking. ‘The intellect of man’, Yeats wrote in his epigrammatic ‘The Choice’, ‘is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work’. Yet whether we are consulting RF Foster’s great two-volume biography, WB Yeats: A Life, or the fascinating Cornell editions of his manuscript remains, what makes him so important a figure is that, like many another, he lived an example of a life and left behind an essential body of work without coming near perfection in either. After all, none of us can choose to finesse a felicitous flaw.

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